EDITORS' CORNER
Donors complained he was ‘offensive to Jews’
Israeli scholar Raz Segal received $250,000 in a settlement with the University of Minnesota after the school rescinded his job offer to lead the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Segal alleges that the school rescinded the offer due to backlash over comments he made about the war between Israel and Gaza, Inside Higher Ed reported.
In an op-ed published by Jewish Currents in October 2023, Segal wrote that Israel’s assault on Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide.”
In June 2024, the University of Minnesota offered Segal the position. Two days later, two professors protested his appointment by resigning from the center’s advisory board. Then, the interim president at the time, Jeff Ettinger, revoked his offer, The College Fix previously reported.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group, found through public records requests that one day before Segal lost his job offer, donors warned Ettinger that hiring the scholar would destroy the center because he had been “offensive to Jews.”
In a CCR news release, Segal called the donors’ opposition a “world turned upside down.”
He said that his efforts, as a Jewish Holocaust scholar and grandchild of survivors, to stop a genocide were wrongly treated as a threat to Jews.
He added that the university’s acceptance of this lie in revoking his job offer “exposed its intellectual and moral bankruptcy.”
Further, many students and staff condemned the decision in emails to the university, he said.
“This settlement represents a successful refusal to accept the world of lies that blur an ongoing genocide, and a commitment to continue the intertwined struggles for truth, justice, and accountability—in Palestine and on our campuses,” Segal said.
CCR Deputy Legal Director Maria LaHood said, “UMN willfully violated the First Amendment and its own commitment to academic freedom when it succumbed to donor pressure and revoked Dr. Segal’s job offer because he lived up to his values and called a spade a spade.”
However, university spokesperson Briana Reenshuler told Inside Higher Ed that the settlement “contains no admission of liability or wrongdoing by either party.”
Segal now teaches Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.
He is far from the only professor to make controversial claims about the war in the Middle East.
For example, an anti-Israel professor who was previously arrested for participating in violent protests on campus will teach “Politics of the Middle East” at the City University of New York this upcoming fall semester, The College Fix previously reported.
During a Democratic Socialists of America meeting this year, the professor called for dismantling the U.S. empire.
Another pro-Palestinian professor, Shirin Saeidi, was terminated in December 2025 for anti-Israel social media posts, including content praising Iran’s Supreme Leader and calling for the destruction of Israel, The Fix reported.
Saeidi appealed her firing, but the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees upheld the decision in May.
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